The home page importance myth.
I was listening to the boagworld podcast today, and they brought up an interesting point in response to a listener question. The listener was a web designer concerned with the number of elements his client was adding to the home page. The common belief is that the home page is the most important page of any site. As such, it should be no surprise in the thinking that if it’s important, it belongs on the home page.
These days we are finding our information via search engines which deep link to pages within a site, bypassing the home page altoghether. A lot of effort and money is spent on SEO which is only working to encourage this process. So, home page placement isn’t as paramount as we once thought.
Back to the crowding issue. As designers, we have been taught about the importance of white space in web design. So, to restate the listener’s concern, how are we to explain that not everything important belongs on the home page?
The answer is beautifuly simple, as most good answers are.
For every element added to a page, a bit of importance is deducted from all other items on that page. See? Beautiful. After adding important element after important element, we are left with a overall page of unimportance.
You can easily imagine which is more effective, a page of 30 elements screaming for attention, or a page of 3. Eventually, too many elements on a page forces the user into that frantic, scanning-for-something relevant case Steven Krug talks about in “Don’t Make Me Think“.
Now, we have a justification for white space, other than the fact that it just looks better.
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